Agreed that high fees hurt bitcoins image, but you have to keep in mind there are many people attracted to bitcoin for other reasons. Node and mining centralization hurts bitcoins image even more and the LN is intended to reverse that node centralization trend and including another real problem like the insecurity of 0 conf payments which can hurt bitcoins image far more than paying a couple pennies more per tx... the sad reality is that 0 conf payments have never been secure and will never be secure. What core devs fear more isn't the problems with raising the blocksize to 2MB in itself but the precedence it sets that we can continue to kick that can and put of development on real solutions that solve multiple problems in bitcoin. This is why the 2MB HF is pushed out till next year to make sure that we can deploy the LN and other payment channels which should have been used from years ago.

It is embarrassing that payment processors aren't pushing payment channels more when it will cut down on their fraud. At least bitpay has worked a bit on impulse with Garzik when he worked there and Stephen Pair now acknowledges Core's and others concerns -
https://medium.com/@spair/what-i-learned-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-7f6ff19ac6c3#.i10adcvqa

But Brian still is hopelessly confused.